Ryle claims that “[philosopher] is not a [philosopher]ist” must be true of any genuine philosopher. (The following quote is from Dilemmas, but he makes the point elsewhere too.)

“None the less, though philosophers are and ought to be highly critical persons, their wrangles are not the by-products of loyalty to a party or a school of thought. There do, of course, exist in our midst and inside our skins plenty of disciples, heresy-hunters and electioneers; only these are not philosophers but something else that goes by the same long-suffering name. Karl Marx was sapient enough to deny the impeachment that he was a Marxist. So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything that he had said was the last word. It was left to his disciples to identify his footmarks with his destination.”

Marx famously said to French socialists that he was not a Marxist. Maybe he was Marxian though?

Jim Conant, “Why Kant is Not a Kantian” (2016), Philosophical Topics 44 — argues that contrary to standard narratives of Kant’s place in the history of philosophy, Kant did not take sensibility and understanding to be separably intelligible, and thus that the first Critique‘s Transcendental Aesthetic cannot be the whole story, freely self-standing, about sensibility.

This is a fun kind of point to make. It’s typically a way of saying: so many people for so long have been so wrong about this philosopher; it’s a good thing I showed up to save them.

I admit to getting a frisson from presenting some well-known philosopher’s arguments, sourced from and based on primary texts, that clearly cut against a common version of that philosopher’s ideas. I’m not sure I see myself as saving the dilettantes. But I do think it’s good for philosophers, as continuing students of the tradition, to remain open to surprise by their tradition’s protagonists. Branding a view or a philosopher as, say, platonist, can lull one into thinking one knows just what that view entails or just how that philosopher argues. And it does a disservice to Plato, too, who contains multitudes. Isms tend to focus our attention on conclusions instead of arguments.

But we also shouldn’t pretend as though the isms named after our protagonists are the products only of text-determined argument. They’re the products of history, interpretation, institutional power, fashion, and cultural uptake, too, to name a few factors. The isms, in other words, can take on a life of their own, unresponsive to their namesakes.

Neither should we pretend as though the ideas of great philosophers don’t circulate, both outside and inside of the academy, in caricatured, domesticated, canned, or pre-metabolized form. (See certain presentations of trolley problems, for example.)

And we certainly shouldn’t pretend as though resisting the cartoon versions of our protagonists is important only for the historians of philosophy. For that typically assumes a dichotomy between doing philosophy (arguing for and against views of reality) and doing history of philosophy (bickering over what some old dudes’ views of reality were). But there is a whole tradition of doing history of philosophy in order to do philosophy. (I’m tempted simply to call this tradition doing philosophy.) It’s important for the health of our discipline to revisit the writings, well-known and lesser-known, of its ancestral practitioners, especially when we find ourselves in epicyclic ruts or talking at cross-purposes.

I’ve heard it said that Nietzsche wasn’t a Nietzschean.

“Rylean” is sometimes used to pick out ‘behaviourism’, but some think Ryle wasn’t actually a behaviorist, and so if he wasn’t then in a sense Ryle wasn’t a Rylean.

Not directly to the question, but I do think that the misinterpretation of Hume’s views is a wide-spread and serious matter simply if one wants to understand Hume’s views. (As an aside, Kant also makes comments about people misunderstanding Hume, and their supposed criticisms being wide of the mark.) But what strikes me as also misleading is the idea that the problem lies in too unreflectively jumping from epistemic matters to ontological (metaphysical) ones, which certainly does happen. But especially with Hume, neither his epistemology (which is a sort of moderate skepticism) nor his metaphysics lies at the center of what he is doing: it is rather his semantics or—to put it the way he would—his theory of ideas. Hume’s views largely flow from his empiricism about ideas. And it is exactly because of that account of the origin of ideas that he is *not* any kind of radical skeptic about causation or (again to follow him) necessary connection.

Hume argues that the concept of cause and effect contains the idea of some sort of necessary connection between the cause and effect, and then he reasonably asks—as an empiricist—what precisely the content of that concept is. He argues that it is not the copy of any impression of sensation or impression of reflection that is produced from just any *single* experience of A followed by B. He could, I suppose, have then concluded that there just is no such idea at all. But he doesn’t. He searches around for some account of the content of the idea of necessary connection (and hence causation) and famously finds not one but two such accounts (and, as Lewis later notes, rather cryptically deploys a third). One articulates the notion of necessary connection in terms of constant conjunction (in fact), and the other articulates the notion in terms of the impression of reflection—the *feel*—that accompanies the habitual transition of the mind from one idea to another after a habit is formed. He complains a bit that both of these definitions draw from matters that are “foreign to the cause”, i.e. what makes a particular cause/effect pair an instance of causation goes beyond facts about just those two events. But still, he is reasonably satisfied by each of the two definitions.

My point here is that according to either of the two definitions there are in fact causes and effects! There certainly are events whose ideas are connected in the mind due to habit, and Hume never questions that there are also types of events that stand in the relation of universal constant conjunction. And by his own definition, *those are bona fide instances of cause and effect*. To note the definitions but then say Hume is a skeptic about causation or denies there is causation is to miss what he is doing. On account of his empiricism, Hume doesn’t think we could possibly *mean* anything else by “A caused B” except either “B followed A and all instances similar to A are followed by instances similar to B” or “B followed A and someone feels a customary transition of their mind from the idea of A to the idea of B”. For Hume, there just is no other idea of causation or necessary connection to be skeptical about. And he does not himself seriously question whether either of the conditions ever hold, so he does not seriously question where there are causes and effects.